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Fear and Anxiety as strategies for resistance and political transformation

Andreja Zevnik
Black Lives Matter and Anxiety as a strategy of resistance and political transformation

Date: Wednesday March 1st 2017
Time: 3.30-5
Room: ALB G18
ALL WELCOME

Abstract
The paper looks at how anxiety work as forces of mobilisation in the context for political transformations. Jacques Lacan said that anxiety is different from fear; if fear has an object, the object of anxiety is ungraspable to subject's consciousness. While on the one hand subjects can grasp the object of fear through the experience of threat; the experience of anxiety, on the other hand, is linked to something more tangible yet in turn much more fundamental to the subject's existence. The experience of anxiety, as this paper argues, re-shapes subject’s political existence and modes of political engagement. It stems from subject's perception of the self in the existing political context. The paper highlights the transformations in resisting subjectivity and resistance practice from the times of civil rights movement in the US and the claim for ‘political rights and recognition’, to what is today called a political project of Black Lives Matter. With a focus on Black Lives Matters (as a movement and a claim for recognition of life) the paper shows how the concept of anxiety alters the temporalities of the resisting subject, of its political action and theorizes transformations of the modern resisting subjectivity.